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Starters

In the coming weeks, we will be bombarded with news that a starting pitcher is working on a new pitch or is feeling the best he has felt in years. Most of this is noise. The better storylines to follow in spring training are the more subtle ones.

It's easy to fall in love with strong half seasons. It's also easy to read too much into them. After all, the midpoint of the season is an arbitrary cutoff, and there are bound to be performance swings between any few months of data. That said, many starting pitchers who surge down the stretch often are better speculations than others. Let's take a look at the SP whose BPV increased the most between the first and second halves of 2011: